4 ms·
You should have calculated for inflation. Without it, your numbers appear misleading. 7.5 billion in 1987 is the equivalent of 15.1 billion today. So they've
by robertpateii 14y ago
You should have calculated for inflation. Without it, your numbers appear misleading.
7.5 billion in 1987 is the equivalent of 15.1 billion today.
So they've had no effective increase in budget. Which helps us to choose the right question: Are they doing more today than they were doing in 1987? And what could they do with more budget?
- joshuahedlund 14y ago15.1 -> 18.4 is still a 22% increase. That's arguably "no effective increase" if you're counting per capita, but if NASA is the type of public good that offers the same amount of value whether population increases or not, I don't think a 22% is too bad. It just looks sad next to the other categories that have increased so much more.
- gjm11 14y agoIt's an increase of 0.8% per year. And if the time series happened to have been started at 1988 -- there was a big increase in NASA's budget between 1987 and 1988 -- it would have been about 0.16% per year instead. (Incidentally, something is definitely wrong with Wikipedia's figures, which show the nominal budget going up $7.6M -> $9.1M but the inflation-adjusted budget going down $17.7M -> $14.5M between 1987 and 1988.) The goods provided by NASA are things like technological innovation, scientific discovery, and sheer coolness, all of which (it seems to me) provide net benefit proportional to the population. And the tax revenues available to fund it are kinda-sorta proportional to population too, even ignoring economic growth. So an increase of, at most, 22% over a 25-year period during which the population has grown by about 28% and the inflation-adjusted GDP by about 2x ... yes, I think that is too bad.
- krschultz 14y agoOr what could they do with a more intelligently allocated budget of the same or lower dollar amount?